1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to inventory management in a data center and more particularly to locating physical resources in a data center.
2. Description of the Related Art
A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. The typical data center generally includes not only a multiplicity of servers, both stand alone and rackmount, but also communication switching devices, redundant or backup power supplies, environmental controls including air conditioning and fire suppression and security devices. Oftentimes, different sets of servers and associated switches are stored in cabinets within the data center or on racks in the data center, with those cabinets or racks organized in rows just as may be the case with bookshelves in a library.
In any datacenter environment, it is necessary to track the location of each physical hardware component for several reasons. However, the location of a hardware component in a datacenter can differ from a specific rack or cabinet number in a particular location, to a slot within a chassis located in a specific rack or cabinet in a particular location. Current solutions address the complexity of locating individual hardware components in the data center through the utilization of several technologies such as universal product codes (UPC) and radiofrequency identification (RFID) tags. Still, neither UPC codes nor RFID tags are tied to a specific location in the data center. In particular, when using an RFID reader sensing an RFID tag, the RFID reader only can indicate the proximity of the RFID to the reader. The RFID tag, however, cannot deliver its actual physical location in the data center to the RFID reader.